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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

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Another interesting title:

http://www.indiana.edu/~scotus/files/OConnorFWEmergSciBrainBehav.pdf

Conscious Willing and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and Behavior

Summary. Recent studies within neuroscience and cognitive psychology have explored the place of conscious willing in the generation of purposive action. Some have argued that certain findings indicate that the commonsensical view that we control many of our actions through conscious willing is largely or wholly illusory. I rebut such arguments, contending that they typically rest on a conflation of distinct phenomena. Nevertheless, I also suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of the will need to be revised: a raft of studies indicate that control over one’s own will among human beings is limited, fragile, and – insofar as control depends to an extent on conscious knowledge – admitting of degrees. I briefly sketch several dimensions along which freedom of the will may vary over time and across agents.
 
lol - when I click on your link above it shows up forbidden and I have to take the "s" off - so it seems there is no help for a simpler way!

It seems that all operational systems in/within the net are not 'go' for users searching from different 'what?' -- 'platforms', search engines, or what else?
 

A random thought: what if some neurons and interconnected systems of neurons have developed out of purely emotional [and protopsychic] responses to things and others experienced within prereflective consciousness/preflective experience, both in species still lacking in reflective consciousness and in our species, in which prereflective consciousness continues to operate alongside -- and perhaps beneath -- our reflective thinking.
 
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A random thought: what if some neurons and interconnected systems of neurons have developed out of purely emotional [and protopsychic] responses to things and others experienced within prereflective consciousness/preflective experience, both in species still lacking in reflective consciousness and in our species, in which prereflective consciousness continues to operate alongside -- and perhaps beneath -- our reflective thinking.

That's a pretty interesting way that consciousness and intentionality could be basic...what made you think of it?

What I've read in neural networks, so far, hasn't addressed consciousness or intention (as we've discussed it here) the interested parties are:

1. AI folks who have a goal of machine intelligence (which doesn't, necessarily, have to be like human intelligence)

2. logicians who see that by connecting non-monotonic logic to neural nets, they can re-establish the ideas of the "laws of thought" that was key to Frege's development of modern logic.*

Both are very interesting to me but they don't seem to directly address consciousness.

* https://www.researchgate.net/profil...00/From-Logic-to-Neural-Networks-and-Back.pdf

"This is just one instance of how theoretical investigations on non-monotonic logic – or logic in general – may have a bearing on issues in cognitive science and vice versa. The logic of the human subject is a subject of logic again. Many beautiful and surprising results may be expected to follow and logic may prosper from these developments just as much as cognitive science already does."
 
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That's a pretty interesting way that consciousness and intentionality could be basic...what made you think of it?

It just occurred to me after re-reading your post #806 and especially its last paragraph, which you quoted from Andrew Ng (the paragraph I quoted in my post above). I've since followed that paragraph to its source, since you posted it as a hyperlink, and am especially interested in the attempt to produce "deep learning" in AI neural nets described there. I've just started tonight to read the paper "Ten Misconceptions about Neural Networks," which you also linked in your post. I'll post both links again below, following a link to your post #806, since all of this is immensely interesting.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

Google Brain’s Co-Inventor Tells Why He’s Building Chinese Neural Networks

10 Misconceptions about Neural Networks
 
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It just occurred to me after re-reading your post #806 and especially its last paragraph, which you quoted from Andrew Ng (the paragraph I quoted in my post above). I've since followed that paragraph to its source, since you posted it as a hyperlink, and am especially interested in the attempt to produce "deep learning" in AI neural nets described there. I've just started tonight to read the paper "Ten Misconceptions about Neural Networks," which you also linked in your post. I'll post both links again below, following a link to your post #806, since all of this is immensely interesting.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

Google Brain’s Co-Inventor Tells Why He’s Building Chinese Neural Networks

10 Misconceptions about Neural Networks

"deep learning" is based on the idea that a neuron will take various inputs, weigh them and fire when a certain threshold is obtained, a Pitts-McCulloch Perceptron is one such unit - you can actually build a Perceptron, even a small network of them, with op-amps (a very inexpensive IC that is a staple of hobby electronics) - but larger networks are instantiated in software - the basic algorithm which "trains" the neuron is called backpropagation - and it is brilliant, but ultimately simple and requires a lot of computing power - that is why "deep learning" is new although backpropagation is old. I posted above that one of the pioneers of backpropagation is now saying with should drop it as a move in the wrong direction. There is supervised and unsupervised learning, but both rely on a clear goal that can be measured against the network's output and fed back into it - animals and people, even "simple" animals like ants, autonomously learn in much more complex and noisy environments - but that brings up genetic algorithms which probably compare to evolution the way NNs compare to real neurons ... still, what you can then do is use a genetic algorithm to design a neural network ... we really are very clever mimics ;-)

By the way, there are a lot of online demos of both NNs and genetic algorithms.

What is interesting is the increasing interest in analog neural networks - the memristor is now available commercially (well, $240 for a chip with 8) but it is the missing piece for analog neural networks - when a voltage is applied, the memristor "grows" synapses (analogous to the strengthening of connections between neurons) and when the voltage drops, the channel shrinks - allowing the analog network to "learn" over time using something like Hebbian learning principles. I think low cost, efficient neural networks could come out of this compared to the overhead required to run neural networks as simulations on computers as is now done. Anyway, it will be interesting to see.

Real neurons are complicated living cells that have many many connections ... still, the idea is there in Artificial Neural Networks, and analog versions, it seems to me, stand a chance at being a much more efficient kind of thing for some applications than having to use all the overhead of simulating it on a computer. I would expect we could see these embedded in various systems as we now see microprocessors embedded.

Also, note, for both GAs and NNs - there are a specific class of problems that they are very good at - but there is nothing so far on the horizon, that I am aware of, toward a "general intelligence" - so Watson's deep blue winning on Jeopardy, if you back up a bit and squint, isn't really any more impressive than computers winning at chess - which we have all gotten used to and which hasn't, so far, led to computers taking over the world, or, really, being very smart at all.

Still, recently a couple of Google computers apparently started talking to each other in a language no one else understood ...

But then, there is this:

 
Still, recently a couple of Google computers apparently started talking to each other in a language no one else understood ...

I think that's astonishing and I want to understand more about it. Do you have a link to the source where you read about this?

I'm really glad that you understand so much about computer technology and artificial neural nets since all this apparently plays a significant role in recent thinking about the nature of human language. The Wikipedia link below seems to provide a good survey of efforts to understand the variability among human languages and thought, the differences in what languages reveal about the connection between what is thought and what is expressed linguistically in different cultures. That two Google computers appear to have been observed to communicate with one another in a language no one else can understand seems to indicate the presence of thinking in some complex interconnected computers developed in our time. I wonder what perceived needs led them to evolve a language of their own in which to share and interrogate perspectives (or perhaps ambiguities) in/on the 'world' in which they uniquely find themselves functioning. It reminds me of a phenomenon described by the professor teaching a course in Linguistics that I took in graduate school, in which bilingual parents of twin toddlers found that their twins had developed a language of their own different from both of the languages the parents used in talking to the children. So much to learn about, and from, language itself!!!

Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia
 
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I hope we can develop a discussion here of Whorf's seminal research and his resulting theory concerning language, experience, and thought. It's well-summarized in this paragraph from his 1956 book, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, MIT Press:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."
 
From semiotics we learn that structures of signification arise in the prereflective experience and developing orientation to/in the world for animals as well as humans. We've thought that human languages develop from reflective experience once our species reaches the level of reflective consciousness. But how can we be sure of that since we recognize that signed communication takes place among what we presume are animals existing in a state of prereflectiveness, prereflectivity. What we need to do, and what some disciplines have begun to do, is to explore language as well as culture archaeologically from phenomenological and semiotic perspectives. The paper linked below describes this kind of research.

Phenomenology and semiotics: crossing perspectives

Antonino Bondì, LIAS-IMM/EHESS- Paris
Francesco La Mantia, Università di Palermo

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy Vol. 3 n. 1 (2015)

Extract:

"So it is in a spirit of interdisciplinarity that semiotic anthropology operates. It is notable for its ability to integrate different dimensions of the human, aiming at biological continuity - social without denying the uniqueness of man. It is no exaggeration to say that the main feature of semiotic anthropology is precisely its emphasis on phenomenology. For phenomenologists, the human being has the specific responsibility to put himself in history, in a dialogue of self to self as to others. This basic historicity of the human being is unmatched in semiotic anthropology, where the experience of the human being is valued in its singularity while remaining in the field of historical and socio-cultural structures. The phenomenological perspective in which semiotic anthropology is inscribed provides a framework for thinking in anthropological terms of the meeting between subjects making use of those to which the plot of the senses is linked. Any meeting can be seen as a socio-semiotic game that involves institutions (knowledge, transmission, norms, values and practices) and distributions of roles where the individual understands himself first as a semiotic perception, joint attention, participation in an intersubjectivity with a ritualized interactions directory.

The phenomenological contribution of semiotic anthropology avoids deadlocks of the individual as the sole measure of its goals and actions as well as those of the overhanging social reality or autonomous symbolic order. In reference to a semiotic phenomenology similar to that of Merleau-Ponty, semiotic anthropology offers epistemological tools to envision body / mind / social continuity without flatly falling into purely logical bio-psycho-social determinants.

Immediately considering perception as semiotics, and cognition as immediately social, and respecting the character which is both public and embodied with expression, semiotic anthropology proposes an epistemological framework that can be transposed within the humanities and social sciences in terms of genetic theories of fields and forms. This continuity which is essential for the hope of tying the humanities and social sciences to natural sciences opens new interdisciplinary dialogues in the field of semiotics."

http://www.metodo-rivista.eu/index.php/metodo/article/view/118/104
 
This paper is also helpful for this discussion:

The Phenomenological Road to Cognitive Semiotics
Göran Sonesson, Lund University, Malmö (Sweden)

Abstract

Like M. Jordan, who discovered in his old age that he had always been talking prose, I realized a few years ago that I have been doing cognitive semiotics my whole life. In my 1978 dissertation I argued for an «integral linguistics», meaning both that linguistic theory should be conceived within a wider semiotic framework, and that we should abandon the «autonomy postulate», according to which theoretical models must be independent of empirical findings, which dominated both linguistics and semiotics at the time. When you build theory with the help of a phenomenological method, there is a much shorter distance between theory and experience, because phenomenology is empirical attention to consciousness. Much later I became acquainted with Paul Bouissac’s description of semiotics as «meta-analysis», which «consists in reading through a large number of specialised scientific publications/…/ in one or several domains of inquiry, and of relating the partial results within a more encompassing model». Cognitive science is for the most part also a kind of meta-analysis. Nevertheless, semiotics has interest in adopting the practice of cognitive science that consists in submitting its own questions to empirical study. The essential difference between cognitive science and semiotics, however, resides elsewhere, in the point of view taken in the construction of the encompassing model. In semiotics, the point of view that determines the construction of the model is meaning in the widest sense of the term. In cognitive science it is cognition, but in a sense itself redefined by the approach, first, during the reign of the computer metaphor, as everything in the mind which may be simulated on a computer, and then, with the later brain model, as everything which can be detected as occurring in the brain. Semiotics, on the other hand, has generated its own reductionist models from within, most notoriously those of Saussure and Peirce. To avoid reductionism, it will be argued, Husserlean phenomenology, rather than the Peircean brand, is a more suitable method to employ in the study of meaning.

http://www.metodo-rivista.eu/index.php/metodo/article/view/118/104
 
This paper by Richard Lanigan is also most enlightening concerning the relationships among contemporary theories and research protocols united in the search for an understanding of consciousness, language, and thought:

The Public Journal of Semiotics IV(2), February 2013 71

Communicology and Culturology: Semiotic Phenomenological Method in Applied Small Group Research

Richard L. Lanigan, International Communicology Institute, Washington, D.C., USA
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, Illinois, USA

Abstract

Communicology is the science of human communication where consciousness is constituted as a medium of communication at four interconnected levels of interaction experience: intrapersonal (embodied), interpersonal (dyadic), group (social), and inter-group (cultural). The focus of the paper is the group level of communication across generations, thus constituting inter-group communication that stabilizes norms (forms a culture). I propose to explicate the way in which the method of semiotic phenomenology informs the pioneering work at the University of Toronto by Tom McFeat, a Harvard trained cultural anthropologist, on small group cultures as an experimental research methodology. Rather than the cognitive analytic (Husserl‘s transcendental eidetic) techniques suggest by Don Ihde as a pseudo-experimental phenomenology‖, McFeat provides an applied method for the empirical experimental constitution of culture in conscious experience. Group cultures are constructed in the communicological practices of group formation and transformation by means of a self-generating group narrative (myth) design. McFeat‘s method consists of three steps of culture formation by communication that are: (1) Content-Ordering, (2) Task-Ordering, and (3) Group-Ordering, i.e., what Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers call the logic of culture or Culturology. These steps are compared to the descriptive phenomenology research procedures suggested by Amedeo Giorgi following Husserl‘s approach: (1) Find a sense of the whole, (2) Determine meaning units, (3) Transform the natural attitude expressions into phenomenologically, psychologically sensitive expressions. A second correlation will be made to Richard Lanigan‘s semiotic phenomenology method following the work of Cassirer, Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty: (1) Description of Signs, (2) Reduction of Signifiers, and (3) Interpretation of Signifieds.

1. Introduction

The human science of Communicology culminates from several disciplinary developments, largely viewed as singular constitutions and foundational to differential attitudes about (1) the nature and function of philosophy and (2) the theory and method of science in apposition to human embodiment (Merleau-Ponty‘s reflective, reversible, reflexive consciousness of experience as experience of consciousness). In more familiar terms, the idea of Culture stands in contrast to the idea of Science, because there is a measured distinction between what human beings express and what they perceive. In Modernity, we know this situation as the emergence of (1) the distinct cultural disciplines of Linguistics (constraining Anthropology and Philology), History (constraining Sociology and Political Economy), Philosophy (constraining Logic and Psychology) over against (2) the distinct scientific disciplines of Biology, Mathematics, and Physics. Ernst Cassirer explores this problematic of the disciplines in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942/2000) where he distinguishes Culture as the perception-of-expression and Science as the perception-of-objects. Cassirer‘s four volume thematic of a qualitative human science is to be found in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1996) where his semiotic phenomenology of human communication is articulated in detail wherein Science is in the service of Culture. In this context, human understanding emerges from the semiotic matrix of communication and culture and comes to constitute the essence of the person. As a research problematic, this proposition requires explanation. Explanations of human communication are by definition projects in metatheory construction. Just as natural languages may be used to explain themselves, the construction rules for communication systems may be used to articulate new paradigms constituting a higher logical type of communication‖ (Lanigan 1988: 184; Cassirer 1946/1953). The main focus of my research analysis is an explication of the method and process by which persons constitute their culture through the communication of understanding and memory.

My explication necessarily is an analysis of human science qualitative methodology (Phenomenology). Historically there have been two contemporary schools of thought on phenomenological methodology that emerged in the United States respectively in the disciplines of Psychology and Communicology. Amadeo Giorgi (2009) in the Department of Psychology at Duquesne University is the founding figure for the approach known as descriptive phenomenology. My own work (Lanigan 1984, 1988, 1992) in the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University established the approach of semiotic phenomenology in the discipline of Communicology. In addition, the issue of empirical and eidetic methodology within Phenomenology was introduced by Don Ihde (1970) in the discipline of Philosophy. Thus, my overall analysis takes up these various methodological issues by raising certain theory construction concerns which are, in turn, exemplified with published research drawn from the disciplines of anthropology, communicology, psychology, and philosophy. . . ."

http://journals.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/pjos/article/download/8843/7942
 
This paper is likely also important for a well-informed understanding of language as currently understood:

Where is the mind? The extended mind reloaded
Giusy Gallo and Claudia Stancati

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to reshape the mind-body problem in the light of the theory of the extended mind and its relationship to recent technological developments. Rereading the mind-body problem implies returning to Descartes, as it is well known that the crucial theoretical point of the contemporary philosophy of mind is the refusal of Dualism. Despite the philosophers of mind, on one hand, Descartes wasn’t what is usually called dualist, and, on the other hand, reductionism does not work the way recent researches have shown. Taking seriously the relationship between the human mind, body, and the technological developments we are facing, we claim for an account of the mind-body problem which includes biological aspects and society, such as the place in which technology reveals itself3.

Keywords. mind-body problem, extended mind, dualism, technological artefacts.

Where is the mind? The extended mind reloaded
 
Looking forward to the details of your responses to this significant paper that @Pharoah has linked. I'm impressed by the reasoning employed in this paper, for example in this paragraph:

...

I'm afraid that is the details ... :-) I've not had a chance to look at it again in a while. I am curious what @Pharoah finds interesting in it?
 
I think that's astonishing and I want to understand more about it. Do you have a link to the source where you read about this?

I'm really glad that you understand so much about computer technology and artificial neural nets since all this apparently plays a significant role in recent thinking about the nature of human language. The Wikipedia link below seems to provide a good survey of efforts to understand the variability among human languages and thought, the differences in what languages reveal about the connection between what is thought and what is expressed linguistically in different cultures. That two Google computers appear to have been observed to communicate with one another in a language no one else can understand seems to indicate the presence of thinking in some complex interconnected computers developed in our time. I wonder what perceived needs led them to evolve a language of their own in which to share and interrogate perspectives (or perhaps ambiguities) in/on the 'world' in which they uniquely find themselves functioning. It reminds me of a phenomenon described by the professor teaching a course in Linguistics that I took in graduate school, in which bilingual parents of twin toddlers found that their twins had developed a language of their own different from both of the languages the parents used in talking to the children. So much to learn about, and from, language itself!!!

Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia

I am a bit skeptical of the computers talking to one another, so I am going to look on Quora ...

here is one set of answers - some people feel there might not be that much to the story:

https://www.quora.com/Facebook-and-...d-their-own-language-What-do-you-make-of-this
 
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